233: Muse Is Why Meta Has No Business Building The Agentic Web

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's AI agent, Muse, needs to be discreet. The same month, some of the calls it made to businesses were placed by people in a call center. I went through what he told Joanna Stern and Alex Heath about Muse's privacy and security and sorted every claim by tense. What exists today, only Meta has checked. The protection from Meta itself is promised for later this year. My verdict: stay away from this. After the sign-off, the show moves to Saturday mornings.

Chapters

• 00:00 - Discreet AI, and calls made by people
• 00:59 - What Muse is, and the agentic web
• 02:33 - Joanna Stern's question
• 03:57 - Present tense: the virtual machine and the ads
• 05:45 - Passwords, Sentinel, Amazon and the Mac app
• 07:05 - Future tense: the locked version and discretion
• 10:10 - Who is asking: an ad company with a privacy record
• 11:40 - From the browser wars to the agent wars
• 14:42 - Two documents, 1993 and 2026
• 16:00 - After the episode: moving to Saturdays

Key Numbers

• 500,000+ people tried Muse in its first week, as reported by The Information
• 97.6% of Meta's 2025 revenue came from ads
• $5 billion: the FTC's 2019 privacy penalty on Facebook
• 87 million people's data reached Cambridge Analytica
• 1993: CERN put the web's code in the public domain
• "Later this year": when Meta says the version it cannot see inside arrives

Key Takeaways

1. Listen for the tense. What Muse does today is described only by Meta, and nobody outside Meta has published a check of it. The version Meta itself cannot see inside is promised for later.
2. Meta's plan for Muse is a small cut of every transaction. Zuckerberg said the cut will come from the businesses. If you run a store, that is you.
3. The early web worked because it was given away and ran on your own computer. This time the companies want to be in the middle from day one. It is the browser wars again, fought over the agent.

What to Do

• Before you connect your email, passwords or card to any agent, ask how it works today, in the present tense.
• If you run a store on Shopify, check Sales channels, then Agentic. Meta's agent and Google's AI may be on by default.
• Watch the full Joanna Stern interview.
• The No Hacks newsletter is at nohacks.co/subscribe.

Sources & Links

The interviews

• Joanna Stern, New Things with Joanna Stern
• Alex Heath, Sources podcast

Meta's own words

• Introducing Muse
• Meta's 2025 annual report

The record

• FTC, $5 billion penalty
• CERN, 30 years of a free and open web

No Hacks with Slobodan Manić · nohacks.co · Newsletter: nohacks.co/newsletter